So sorry, but the big contest is over, and nobody won. In the January 29 Reading List, you were asked to uncover an error in a list of books featuring ghosts (in honor of Hillary Clinton’s unindicted co-author of It Takes a Village). In the plot description of Wuthering Heights, we said that ” Cathy and Heathcliff meet again only as ghosts on the moors.” Wrong! That’s from the 1939 movie version, featuring an absurd happy ending with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon walking around together after death — and you could see right through them!
In honor of this week’s cover, we feature a few works about political ambition:
Medea, by Aeschylus. People forget just why Medea ends up killing her own sons; it’s because Jason, whose consort she has become, decides to make a strategic marriage with Creusa to enhance his own political ambitions. And so Medea takes her revenge.
Jennie Gerhardt, by Theodore Dreiser. How a senator’s rising star is quashed because he can’t keep his hands off the beautiful title character.
Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare. This high political drama features the greatest portrait of back-door ambition in literature: the character of Cassius, with the “lean and hungry” look, who manages to stir up Brutus into assassination by bemoaning the inability of anyone but Caesar to cast a shadow in Rome — perhaps because he does not have the guts to kill the emperor himself.
